Graphic Backgrounds: Collective Dissociative Trauma in Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds (2007)

This article explores how Rutu Modan’s graphic novel Exit Wounds (2007) uses background art to provide richer insights into both the existential fear of complete annihilation experienced by many Israelis during The Second Intifada, and the inability of numerous Israelis to confront this fear directly. Drawing on comics studies, trauma studies, and Israel-Palestine studies the article examines markers of trauma, pulsating in plain sight yet hidden against a foreground of normality. In these backgrounds, recurring references to terror work to juxtapose the pretense of normalcy in the main narrative. By identifying repetitions of a common theme ‘braided’ throughout the illustrations, the reader has the potential to experience a supplementary affect outside of the narrative continuity of the work. The text simultaneously expresses a reticence to tell and a desire to show—rewarding close readings with a deeper understanding of the dissociative trauma that permeates Modan’s Israel.


Introduction
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been explored through a variety of lenses in comics, ranging from travelogue, to memoir, to comics journalism (Delisle 2012;Abdelrazaq 2015;Sacco 2003). The emotional nature of the conflict and the visceral quality of its images have resulted in correspondingly dramatic portrayals in many of these works. Unlike these graphic life narratives, Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds (2007) is a graphic novel mystery set against the backdrop of The Second Intifada, a period from 2000-2005 marked by increased tensions and violence between Israelis and Palestinians, during which terrorist attacks directed against Israeli civilians became commonplace. In the comic book, Koby Franco, an Israeli taxicab driver, discovers that his father Gabriel may have been the victim of a suicide bombing. Numi, an Israeli soldier, convinces Koby to embark on a fact-finding mission to determine if his father is alive. Despite this dramatic premise, Modan's illustrations avoid vivid depictions of violence, and the text eschews direct references to terrorism or The Second Intifada. The characters in Exit Wounds treat the idea of death with an emotional numbness, not allowing loss to distract them from their day-to-day routines. However, reading the background art closely in Exit Wounds reveals markers of trauma pulsating throughout the comic. In these backgrounds, recurring references to terror work to juxtapose the pretense of normalcy in the main narrative. These backgrounds have the potential to provide richer insights into both the existential fear of complete annihilation 1 experienced by many Israelis during The Second Intifada, and the inability of numerous Israelis to confront this fear directly.
In order to appreciate Modan's work in context this paper asks the following research questions: How can we apply the psychological framework of trauma studies to better appreciate how disassociation and numbness functions in Modan's Israel? Are these traumatic expressions universal or distinct to the Israeli context?
In what ways can comics represent the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that are unique to the medium? By exploring these questions, we discover a text that simultaneously expresses a reticence to tell and a desire to show-rewarding close readings with a deeper understanding of the dissociative trauma that permeates Modan's Israel. This article offers a clinical exploration of the type of dissociative trauma being expressed in Exit Wounds, the symptoms specific to this type of trauma and examples of its expression throughout the text. Exploring the literary devices unique to comics, this work applies Thierry Groensteen's scholarship on 'braiding' to unpack how sequential repetition offers readers a potential affect that is supplementary to 1 Israeli sociologists identify The Second Intifada as a collective trauma, marking a psychological return to an Israeli sense of self-victimization. Almost all Israeli Jews surveyed at this time (92%) felt, "afraid or very afraid that they or their family members would be hurt by terror" and a strong majority (85.5%) believed that, "ongoing terror attacks might cause a strategic and even existential threat to the State of Israel" (Bar-Tal et al. 2010: 90-91). the main narrative. Lastly, the importance of Israel's national sociology is incorporated in the critical analysis of the comic. By understanding Israeli society as one constantly engaged in a nation building project that rejects passionate displays of emotion, the trauma in the comic can be appreciated in a context that is simultaneously individually universal, and yet geographically particular.

The Dissociation of Koby Franco
While discussing the representation of trauma in comics Dominic Davies remarks on the scope of a field "that has migrated across histories, geographies, and disciplines, morphing, modulating, and adapting at every turn" (Davies & Rifkind 2020: 1). Drawing upon the work of fellow comics scholar Kate Polak, Davies emphasizes that in the case of comics trauma is affective, "built into the readerly encounter" (2). The ability of comics to represent trauma affectively has become a canonical staple of the field insomuch as comics studies and trauma studies "are bound up in one another's genealogies, locked in a mutually constituting and continually symbiotic relationship with no clean beginning or end" (9). Based on the breadth of representations of the traumatic in comics it is prudent to be specific about exactly what we mean by trauma in the clinical sense before unpacking how representations of this particular trauma function to produce an affective encounter within Exit Wounds.
In The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization (2006), Onno van der Hart and his colleagues explore trauma as an emotional wound that stems from experiences the subject is unable to process at the time they occur. The Haunted Self stresses that symptoms of trauma are not always demonstrated through extreme emotions such as anger or fear, but alternatively through structural disassociation. In other words, dissociative trauma implies the co-existence of two parts of the personality, one concerned with living everyday life, and the other with avoiding traumatic memory. As such, those experiencing structural dissociation may present a façade of normalcy on the surface, while at the same time undergoing emotional numbness, and a subjective detachment from reality (Hart et al. 2006: 48). In Exit Wounds, Modan represents the nuanced reality of dissociative trauma through her portrayal of Jewish Israelis living through The Second Intifada. On the surface, life seems to continue as usual, despite the prevalence of suicide bombing attacks. Characters go about their day-to-day routines in a manner that appears surprisingly unaffected by the volatile political conditions and spontaneous violence of the region. At the beginning of the narrative, Koby is informed that his father may have been killed in a bombing at the Hadera Central Bus Station (Modan 2007: 17). Koby's mother is previously deceased, and he is estranged from his father. His closest-albeit perpetually strained -relationships are between his aunt Ruthie, his uncle Aryeh, and his sister Orly, who lives in New York. When Koby hears about the potential death of his father, with whom he has not spoken in years, he calls his sister from the apartment of his aunt and uncle to see if she can shed light on the situation (21). Modan juxtaposes the severity of the possible loss with the matter-of-fact way the characters respond to it. In Tel Aviv, Koby paces back and forth on the phone, while his uncle complains to his aunt about the soup they are having for dinner-and she in turn complains about his inconsistent palate. In New York, a disinterested Orly attempts to extricate herself from the conversation as soon as possible (Figure 1). She feigns busyness, while pictured eating cereal and reading The New York Times in a bathrobe (21). At first glance, the entire scene speaks to the communal indifference the family feels towards violence. Despite the imminent possibility of discovering death, life, with all its day-to-day mundanities, its

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Art. 14, page 5 of 22 questionable soup, morning coffee, and the ritual perusing of the daily newspaper continues unabated.
Interestingly, this sequence shows the unaddressed trauma of violent death as visibly present, yet hidden in the background, where its significance is overshadowed by the action in the foreground. In the background of the kitchen there is a framed photograph of Tulik, the son of Ruthie and Aryeh, smiling in his army uniform. Over these four pages, the portrait appears in ten separate panels. In eight of these panels, the portrait is obscured, either by characters standing in front of it, or by speech balloons indicating dialogue figuratively talking over it (Figure 2). The portrait is only clearly visible in the first and last panels of the sequence, where Koby, who has received neither confirmation nor denial of his father's survival, glances towards it and is momentarily lost for words. Above Koby, a single speech balloon reads, "um…" (25). At this stage in the narrative, the portrait is not accompanied by identifying text, and Modan offers no visual clues as to whom it depicts. Only later, in the second section of the comic, "My Travels With The Giraffe," when Koby and Numi are reminiscing over a family photograph from Koby's past, do we learn that Ruthie and Areyeh had a son, Tulik who was killed in the war in Lebanon (66). This new information acts to change the meaning of the portrait in retrospect. Like many Jewish Israelis, Koby exists simultaneously in the everyday, but also in the unspeakable, and unaddressed shadow of death. Once the reader becomes aware that Tulik has been killed in the conflict, a recursive reading allows a new appreciation of the role that Tulik's portrait plays as a visual commemoration of a war martyr, without anyone ever explicitly saying the words 'war' or 'martyr.' For readers, this new information may provide a retrospective meaning to the repetitions of Tulik's portrait in the previous background imagery; it immerses readers into a world that constantly alludes to death, but never overtly engages with it.
Even when Modan identifies Tulik as both Koby's only cousin and a fatality of war, his death is never treated as exceptional, or expounded upon by the characters.
Tulik is only mentioned once in the narrative by Koby, when he corrects Numi, who has mistaken Tulik for Koby in a family photograph. Upon realizing Numi's mistake Koby explains, "that's Tulik, Ruthie and Aryeh's son. He was killed in Lebanon" (66).
Koby's tone is matter-of-fact, and the event is left as such. Numi does not offer condolences. Koby does not offer further explanation, and he concludes by describing the photo with a single sentence: "I'm the one peeking out from behind his back" (66).
Koby's statement says nothing, and yet alludes to everything. In The Haunted Self, Hart et al. identify the phenomena of being "fixated in trying to go on with normal life" as a common symptom of structural disassociation in the acutely traumatized (Hart et al. 2006: 5). Modan illustrates this insistence on trying to press on with the ordinary, coupled with the inability to move beyond unaddressed trauma in the photograph of the two cousins. In a close-up panel, Koby and Tulik are depicted as children. Koby is pictured crouched, peeking out from behind the back of his late relation (66). Drawn in the same position as a shadow, he is looking out past Tulik, literally in the shadow of death and looking beyond it (Figure 3). The everydayness with which these Jewish Israelis treat death is reflected in both the photograph of Koby glancing out from behind Tulik, and by the portrait of Tulik that is perpetually obscured, alluding to a societally normalized worldview of looking around, yet never into death.

Benumbing Backgrounds & Stupliminal Signposting
Modan's portrayal of Tulik as a symbol of death, to which characters continually do not respond, creates an affect that is simultaneously startling and banal. A keen memory, or a second reading, would allow a reader to deduce Tulik's role as a recur- ring and yet unaddressed representation of death and precarity. His portrait and Tulik's image reappears throughout the comic book and, despite being obscured, is still recognizable. The portrait's repetition speaks to the truth of trauma theorist Cathy Caruth's declaration that, "to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or an event" (Caruth 1995: 4-5). Tulik is a recurring image, one that possess the reader who integrates the background meanings into the foreground action.
Achieving this recognition allows readers the potential to experience Ngai's stuplimity. Because Tulik's image continues to recur throughout the text, though not in a spectacular, or visceral way, it begins to signify numbness, as characters in the comic refuse to engage with, or unpack the representation of death it embodies. Koby's "umm…" is a non-word, a stand in, a verbal expression of being unable to express.
Modan shows, but does not tell-rejecting overt emotional signposts, such as the use of textboxes in these sections allows readers space to digest the text's stupliminal tone. Surprisingly, Ngai reminds us that, "the loss of strong links in the text paradoxically strengthens an affective link between text and reader, transferring the text's

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Art. 14, page 9 of 22 stupor to him or her" (257). The same affect is achieved by Modan through Koby's stilted dialogue. Rather than simply viewing Koby's disassociation, readers who pay careful attention to the text's backgrounds and context are rewarded with another level of insight into the socio-political and cultural contexts of the primary narrative.
Modan's backgrounds work in conjunction with the main story to historicize, contextualize, and provide an affective window into the numbing and dissociation enacted by Koby and his family.

Truth in Sequence: Repetition and Affectless Affect
In addition to individual trauma, Modan's backgrounds provide rich insights into the societal numbness that permeates her fictional Israel that would be unattainable in other media. In The System of Comics (2009) Eisner writes that in sequential art, "the reader absorbs mood and other abstracts through the artwork" (Eisner 2008: 150). When done effectively, "there is a psychic transmission present… It carries the story's emotional charge to the reader" (Eisner 2008: 153). Contextualizing this ' emotional charge' Matt Reingold emphasizes that the Israel depicted in Exit Wounds is "a place where violence is already a known and accepted reality and it is therefore relegated to the background" (Reingold 2020: 2).
By representing her lived experience in a fictional context "Modan is able to more directly address how terror affects those who have become habituated to it alongside the subtler ways that war is corrosive for a society" (2). Through braiding, Modan's backgrounds are constantly at work to create this affectless affect, both in the subtext of the actions of individual characters, but also through societal signposting, finding

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Art. 14, page 17 of 22 in a national memory project, but also as a moderating symbol of extreme reactions to loss at a community level. The place of this symbol upon the memorial serves not only to bring individual deaths under the auspices of the ongoing national statehood project of Israel, but also to mitigate the acceptable level of reactions to these deaths for characters who view the memorial. In Modan's graphic representation of Israel, lighting a candle becomes an acceptable social practice, while visceral signs of mourning, and the discussion of politics, are expressly frowned upon.
Interestingly, the memorial itself is created from a Coca-Cola advertising stand.
The commercial, commonplace nature of such an item normalizes the memorial space. In an interview with The Comics Journal on Exit Wounds, Modan acknowledges, "when the reality around you is so complicated or frightening people tend to detach themselves from it…we have to protect ourselves" (Modan 2007: 181). This detachment reveals itself in the blurred lines between the revered and the quotidian. Working in conjunction with the Israeli flags, this memorial simultaneously creates a sacred space that demands remembering alongside the continuation of everyday consumer culture. However, the everyday normalcy the memorial represents in this fictional Israel is also constructed as explicitly a-political. A close examination of the panel reveals that angry political graffiti has been scrawled onto the wall. This graffiti is literally and metaphorically obscured by the memorial, which acts to negate more visceral reactions to terrorism. Angry messages, presumably directed towards the Palestinian perpetrators of the attack read: "DEATH TO THE-" (Figure 7) and, "DON'T FORGIVE! DON'T FORGET" (Figure 7). Modan never addresses the politicized nature of violence in Exit Wounds explicitly, only by allusion. Readers must infer the target of the fierce political slogans behind the monument. In summary, the Coca-Cola memorial works in three ways: it blurs the lines between the sacred and the quotidian by not allowing space for bereavement to take place, it uses Israeli national symbols to mitigate the expression of extreme emotion, and it directly obscures the rawer, political expressions of outrage.

Conclusions
Appreciating the depth of a society demands knowing the realities of its daily life, and comics are particularly well suited to this work. In "The Role of Culture in Comics of the Quotidian" (2015), Frank Bramlett explores how depictions of the everyday

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Art. 14, page 19 of 22 offers readers an opportunity to experience "the cultural fabric of the comic's universe" (246). In the case of Exit Wounds, Bramlett draws attention to the fact that "the story does not reveal the beginning of the trauma of war; instead the characters are already living in that environment when readers meet them" (254). As such, their worldviews and traumas have already been forged, and readers must infer these sig-

Author Note
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain permission to reproduce third-party material for the purpose of scholarly criticism and review. The images cited in this article have been presented under educational fair use/dealing and full attribution and copyright information has been provided in the captions.